I'm not that surprised by the results. You know this was given to some intern to keep them busy....

Big doesn't equal great.

I have always had a suspicion that anyhow most car designers are mostly not so great designers but great sketchers/renderers. Just look at 90% of the cars on the road as proof. All car designers seem to be good at is making some ecobox car look awesome in a render that has no connection to reality when shown in flashy lines, 22" rims and crazy forced perspective. Then the real thing gets made from the sketch someone sold and it looks like junk.

At Uni, I talked to two GM sculptures that were visiting.* We asked about making the clay model look like the sketch. They said the clay will always look like the sketch, even if the sketch needs to be redone!

We can imagine forms that can not be made in reality, so it's a back and forth process.

*Car designers do hot renderings. The sculptures make it in 3D. Both require a design background (understanding of form, line, detail, etc). Both require creativity, just one is macro and one is extremely micro.

His view was straight line speed didn't matter in a car chase as even quite normal cars can get pretty fast, what matters is high speed driving skill and experience, and the counter-intuitiveness of high speed handling:

Most Americans believe they are above-average drivers who can handle a car moving at 100+ mph. Most of them are wrong. There is considerable skill involved here, and few people have the opportunity to learn it experientially. Emergency vehicle operations training includes several counter-intuitive aspects, such as staying off of the brake when an obstacle appears directly and immediately in your path (you're usually better off to try and steer around it).

There is also something to be said for the way the vehicle is configured. Many pickup trucks will exceed 100 mph on the highway if pushed, but they have a high center of gravity and are prone to rollovers on tight, high-speed turns.

His view was straight line speed didn't matter in a car chase as even quite normal cars can get pretty fast, what matters is high speed driving skill and experience, and the counter-intuitiveness of high speed handling:

Most Americans believe they are above-average drivers who can handle a car moving at 100+ mph. Most of them are wrong. There is considerable skill involved here, and few people have the opportunity to learn it experientially. Emergency vehicle operations training includes several counter-intuitive aspects, such as staying off of the brake when an obstacle appears directly and immediately in your path (you're usually better off to try and steer around it).

There is also something to be said for the way the vehicle is configured. Many pickup trucks will exceed 100 mph on the highway if pushed, but they have a high center of gravity and are prone to rollovers on tight, high-speed turns.

In this light the Mercedes and Honda drone entries are no-no's.

I can tell you first hand that a well maintained BMW M3 can outrun the police, and I think he is almost spot-on - while most cars can go fast these days, it has to be a vehicle that can go fast quickly and easily then it's all about the driver, his willingness for risk and how well the vehicle can handle [secondarily, knowing your surroundings & traffic patterns, the time of day or night and the size of the police force in a given area helps as well].

Yes!! Reminds me of the motorcycle scene near the beginning of the latest Star Trek remake (where the stationary patrol pod scans his bike's barcode as he flies by and transmits a notice to his helmet that his Social Security account has been debited $500 for the speeding infraction).

Over all pretty disappointing. It seems like the submissions are getting worse every year, or maybe I'm just getting more critical. At the very least these things should be nice to look at, but some of these are borderline eyesores.

The Mercedes Ener-G concept seemed a little out of place with everything else being so futuristic and far reaching, but it was probably my favorite. Apparently they made a full size prototype, some cool details going on.